[feisty] apt and aptitude crashing

[John Vivirito]

Binary package hint: apt

anytime i use apt or aptitude it crashes on feisty here are the crash logs that i found in /var/crash.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

The pyton crash report was same time as the others. there are 2 others one apt-get and one aptitude but they are marked with wrong permissions and using chmod doesnt help, when i figure out how to do it ill add them.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Heres the last of the files.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

ok after reinstalling again i installed package by package to find out what one is causing this and found none of them are. i added pitti's debug repo and ran update now the crashing is starting again. Im going to subscribe martin to this bug. i have no work around at this time other than to reinstall. here is the full repo that i added.
#Debugging repo
deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/ddebs feisty main universe

not exactly sure how a repo would cause this but thats how i reproduce it.

[Aleksander Kamil Modzelewski (aleander)]

Apt-cache and apt-source both crash. I have used apt 0.6.45ubuntu14 and, later, compiled apt 0.6.46.3ubuntu1 (built from source, launchpad build for i386 failed on installation of jadetex) with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="debug nostrip". I have attached a backtrace from apt-get update on 0.6.46.3ubuntu1.

Even removing all of the lines from sources.list does not help.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

What repos did you add to list? im trying to pin this down. Right now i have official repos and apt works great but i had to reinstall to do it since i had no way of removing packages to see if i can fix it.

[Aleksander Kamil Modzelewski (aleander)]

I'll just attach the sources.list. I also tried doing rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* and removing all of the repositories from sources.lists (both all at once and one by one). Nothing helps.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

once you run sudo apt-get update or have synaptic or any other package handler update the sources.list than you apt will not work. for me i was able to pin down the repo but adding one repo at a time and updating it. i didnt have to install any packages just update did it for me. removing the repos after runing apt-get update wont help. i was thinking about cleaning out the cache manully from apt to fix this but im tired of reinstalling this week if it doesnt work, so i may try that in a few weeks.

[Aleksander Kamil Modzelewski (aleander)]

After rm /var/cache/apt/*.bin apt-cache started to work. (the files were pkgcache.bin and srcpkgcache.bin and they were restored after running apt-cache search ls :>)

[Aleksander Kamil Modzelewski (aleander)]

As did all else.

[Aleksander Kamil Modzelewski (aleander)]

Adding edgy-plf repository by hand did not break anything. I tried to add a repository via Synaptic but failed - for some reason the repository dialog only flashes and the python returns "Error: could not find a distribution template". Happens.

Anyway, seems something garbled the package cache (that's bad) and the crippling broke apt (even worse).

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Ok this has just happened without any non official repos just running dist-upgrade caused it. This is not good. im looking to see if the work around works for a little while atleast

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

running sudo rm rm /var/cache/apt/*.bin works but its not a fix.

[Aleksander Kamil Modzelewski (aleander)]

This just happened again. I *think* it may happened when synaptic was run at the same time as /etc/cron.daily/apt.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

I dont use synaptic often so it only happens when i run apt-get update.

[Nafallo Bjälevik (nafallo)]

<mvo> Nafallo: does it help if you remove /var/cache/apt/*.bin ?

That helped for me.

[Asheesh Laroia (paulproteus)]

I have what I think is the same issue on Edgy.

root@alchemy:~# gdb apt-get
[snip]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libthread_db.so.1".

(gdb) run install
Starting program: /usr/bin/apt-get install
Failed to read a valid object file image from memory.
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
Reading package lists... 0%
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xb7c36c53 in strlen () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
(gdb) bt
#0 0xb7c36c53 in strlen () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#1 0xb7dbe186 in std::string::compare () from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
#2 0xb7ebaa27 in debPackagesIndex::FindInCache () from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.4-6.so.3.51
#3 0xbffb054c in ?? ()
#4 0x00000000 in ?? ()
(gdb)

For me, too, removing /var/cache/apt/*.bin works around this bug. I've uploaded those two files to the 'net:

http://paulproteus.acm.jhu.edu/bug-report/2006-12-20/

As this *does* affect Edgy, it'd be helpful if a fix were to go in edgy-updates.